Patagonia is a stark land with lovely surprises

'Patagonia," wrote the British author Bruce Chatwin, is the "country at the far end of the world."

It is a lonely land. Most visitors have been awed by its vastness -- it is three times the size of Britain -- and appalled by its stark emptiness. "There is nothing in Patagonia," complained Argentina's most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges, and American author Paul Theroux agreed: "Nothing [is] . . . the prevailing feature of Patagonia."

Well, yes and no. On Patagonia's Atlantic coast you can see some of the world's most wonderful concentrations of wildlife, sea lion rookeries, penguin colonies and, just off shore, the marvellous spectacle of wooing whales. And on the Andean side are some of the world's most accessible and beautiful glaciers, and mountain forests with alerce trees so huge and ancient they rival California's redwoods.

The middle, admittedly, is empty, the dun-grey, rolling pampas, home to ranches, gauchos and millions of sheep. These are the "boundless plains of Patagonia" that impressed Charles Darwin in 1832.

And, once you're there, Argentina is one of the best travel bargains in the world, especially in light of the dollar's 16-per cent appreciation against the peso during the last year.

We travelled south from Buenos Aires, Argentina's capital, upstairs in a double-decker "coche-cama" bus (at night your seat becomes a bed), and 18 hours later arrived in Puerto Madryn, named after the Welsh nobleman Love Jones Parry, baron of Madryn, by Welsh settlers who arrived in 1865.

We rented a car and began our exploration of the wonders of Patagonia with the large, hammer-shaped Valdes Peninsula, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. Forty years ago, when the U.S. zoologist Roger Payne began to study the region's southern right whales, Valdes Peninsula was "a wonderful peopleless land." Now about 100,000 tourists visit the peninsula each year. Its star attraction are the whales.

Among the rarest whales on Earth (once hunted to near extinction, they now number about 2,000), the southern right whales leave the icy but food-rich waters of Antarctica and arrive in the austral spring in the sheltered and relatively warm bays of the peninsula, to court, to mate, to calve.

They are gentle giants, up to 17 metres long and 50 tonnes in weight. You can observe them, often close to shore, from cliffs of the peninsula. Or you can go whale watching in one of the many boats from Puerto Madryn. The males are ardent wooers, half a dozen may crowd and court a receptive female. If your boat has hydrophones, you can listen to their sonorous moans. Their rampant libido may be explained by the fact that these whales have one-tonne testes, by far the largest of any animal on Earth.

We spent days on the peninsula (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site), entranced by its wealth of wildlife: beaches crowded with sea lions and mighty elephant seals, penguin colonies, and, inland, groups of maras, harelike creatures with white behinds and horsey faces that rear their young in communal creches.

Farther south along the Atlantic coast of Patagonia and now immensely popular, is Punta Tombo, home to half a million Magellanic penguins, the largest and most accessible colony in South America. A broad path zigzags through the immense colony where humans walk and watch in wonder. The rest is for the birds. The broad strand, too, is a penguins-only beach, but you can watch the comings and goings of tens of thousands of busy penguins from a nearby rock outcrop.

Penguin watching can be addictive. After a few days at Punta Tombo, we drove farther south to see more penguins and other seabirds on islands near Puerto Deseado and stayed for an exuberant gaucho festival (similar festivals are held annually in many Patagonian towns).

Gauchos from the surrounding ranches known as estancias streamed into town with their families, their horses, their festival finery. The joyful, colourful fiesta started with a fairly chaotic parade through town, with prancing horses, swarms of children and girls in lovely dresses. Then came a rodeo with bucking horses and cheering crowds, and it ended with traditional "asados," slabs of meat roasted slowly on spits over hardwood fires and eaten with "salmuero," a sauce made of vinegar, garlic, chillies and oregano.

Everybody who was anybody in southern exploration seems to have spent some time farther south in the sheltered harbour of Puerto San Julian. Sir Francis Drake was there and so was Darwin. In the austral winter of 1520, Ferdinand Magellan, near the beginning of the first world-circling voyage, spent five months there, beheaded some mutinous officers and hanged their remains on gallows at nearby Gibbet Point. Near San Julian, too, reported the chronicler of the voyage, the Italian Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan met a "giant," an Indian so huge "the tallest of us only came up to his waist. The captain named this kind of people "Patagones," the Spanish word for "big feet," and thus did Patagonia acquire its name. In San Julian harbour, we toured the tubby, shoe-shaped replica of Magellan's 85-tonne vessel Victoria. The first ship to circle the world was smaller than a modern harbour tug.

We drove south as far as Tierra del Fuego, the far end of our world, then angled northwest across the infinite pampa, to the town of El Calafate in the foothills of the Andes and the gateway to Patagonia's Los Glaciares National Park, the largest mass of ice and the most spectacular glaciers in South America.

While most glaciers in the world recede, the Perito Moreno Glacier near El Calafate advances. It is the most beautiful and most photogenic glacier I've seen. You walk toward it through a wind-twisted forest of southern beeches, hung with mosses and lichens, and suddenly the glacier is in front of you, a vast coruscating mass of ice, sculptured by seracs and crevasses that gleam from milky white to sapphire blue. And while we watched in awe, house-high slabs of ice broke off the 60-metre high glacier face and crashed with a thunderous roar into the lake below.

We continued north on what one guide book calls "South America's worst road -- suited only for gung-ho adventurers," Argentina's infamous Ruta Cuarenta, the grim gravel Highway 40 (parts of it are now being paved) that parallels the Cordillera Mountains. It took us to the steep-cliffed, sienna-brown canyon of the Rio de las Pinturas (River of Paintings) and another UNESCO World Heritage Site, the mysterious Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands).

It is not really a cave, but a series of rock overhangs covered with polychrome paintings made more than 9,000 years ago. Some are hunting scenes: stick figure humans chasing and killing guanacos. But most are stencilled hand prints, about 800 of them. Protected from both rain and direct sunlight, these hands, which seem to be waving at you across nearly a hundred centuries of time, are amazingly vivid, the religio-magic legacy of a long-vanished people.

Much farther north, we reached Esquel, a charming Andean town filled with chalets; in winter it is a favourite ski resort. Now, in the austral summer, we made a wonderful boat trip from mountain lake to mountain lake and on to the 263,000-hectare Parque Nacional Los Alerces that protects the last great stands of alerce trees, also called Patagonian cypress. These soaring giants, some nearly 4,000 years old, can reach 60 metres tall and five metres in diameter.

We ended our trip in the Welsh village of Gaiman. The first 153 Welsh immigrants arrived in 1865 and settled in the Chubut River valley. It was not the green valley of their dreams, but rocky, umber-grey and dry. They persevered, built irrigation channels (many of the ancient water wheels still turn), and by 1882 they numbered 1,286.

Many of their descendants still speak Welsh. Our landlady at the Welsh guest house and orchard farm, Farm Fach, was also conductor of Gaiman's Welsh choir that participates in the local Eisteddfod. We visited the Welsh museum and in the afternoon went to Ty Cymraeg, one of the traditional tea houses, ate cacen ffrwythau and other cakes and had tea from a bulbous pot covered with a chubby cosy.

It was a nice finale to our Patagonian trip. Six weeks and 8,000 kilometres after we started, we drove back to Puerto Madryn.

If you go ...

Canadians do not need visas to visit Argentina. On arrival you receive a tourist card good for 90 days.

A number of airlines fly to Buenos Aires from Vancouver. Aerolineas Argentinas has regular flights from Buenos Aires to most towns in Patagonia. For rates and schedules, call 800-688-0008 or see www.aerolineas.com.ar.

Several bus companies have coche-cama (sleeper-bus) services from Buenos Aires to Patagonia. The cost of a ticket to Puerto Madryn is about $60.

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